al art. For although purity of purpose and fineness of
execution by no means go together, degree to degree (since fine, and
indeed all but the finest, work is often spent in the most wanton purpose
--as in all our modern opera--and the rudest execution is again often
joined with purest purpose, as in a mother's song to her child), still
the entire accomplishment of music is only in the union of both. For the
difference between that "all but" finest and "finest" is an infinite one;
and besides this, however the power of the performer, once attained, may
be afterwards misdirected, in slavery to popular passion or childishness,
and spend itself, at its sweetest, in idle melodies, cold and ephemeral
(like Michael Angelo's snow statue in the other art), or else in vicious
difficulty and miserable noise--crackling of thorns under the pot of
public sensuality--still, the attainment of this power, and the
maintenance of it, involve always in the executant some virtue or courage
of high kind; the understanding of which, and of the difference between
the discipline which develops it and the disorderly efforts of the
amateur, it will be one of our first businesses to estimate rightly. And
though not indeed by degree to degree, yet in essential relation (as of
winds to waves, the one being always the true cause of the other, though
they are not necessarily of equal force at the same time,) we shall find
vice in its varieties, with art-failure,--and virtue in its varieties,
with art-success,--fall and rise together; the peasant-girl's song at her
spinning-wheel, the peasant laborer's "to the oaks and rills,"--domestic
music, feebly yet sensitively skilful,--music for the multitude, of
beneficent or of traitorous power,--dance-melodies, pure and orderly, or
foul and frantic,--march-music, blatant in mere fever of animal
pugnacity, or majestic with force of national duty and memory,--
song-music, reckless, sensual, sickly, slovenly, forgetful even of the
foolish words it effaces with foolish noise,--or thoughtful, sacred,
healthful, artful, forever sanctifying noble thought with separately
distinguished loveliness of belonging sound,--all these families and
graduations of good or evil, however mingled, follow, in so far as they
are good, one constant law of virtue (or "life-strength," which is the
literal meaning of the word, and its intended one, in wise men's mouths),
and in so far as they are evil, are evil by outlawry and unvirtue